


A Future Together

by makoredeyes



Series: The Human Condition [4]
Category: Titanfall
Genre: Angst, Fluff, M/M, Short One Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-21
Updated: 2017-03-21
Packaged: 2018-10-08 17:55:39
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,607
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10392639
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/makoredeyes/pseuds/makoredeyes
Summary: Jack didn’t like to think he hated humanity.  People were gullible, stupid. Violent. He didn’t hate them, but he didn’t forgive them either. They could all stay the hell away from him.With time, the Frontier forgot the war. Forgot the Titans.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This fits into/after my fic Reunion so it'll probably make a little better sense if you read that, but it isn't strictly tied to it.
> 
> Edit: Fixed a few errors.

                Jack Cooper worked in silence, stooped over the long workbench.  Outside the tiny shop, rain fell. Beyond the curtain of precipitation, the plains were silent. Harmony had returned to its namesake, and a hush had fallen over the Frontier.

                Fifteen years had passed. The IMC had collapsed. The Militia had collapsed. The bases lay empty, abandoned. Nature swallowed the wreckage and the craters, and the survivors scattered to the corners of space.  Jack had stayed. 

                Alone in his tiny three-room shack, he worked tirelessly.  When he wasn’t tending to the tiny farm which sustained him, or the significantly more elaborate gardens, he was out, searching. Salvaging.

                He had work to do.

                A body of sorts lay on the bench, lifeless and dark, a compilation of mismatched parts and paint that was somehow, miraculously, symmetrical. 

                In the corner, a generator hummed and a teapot sized box leaked a gentle aquamarine glow.

                In his hands, he held a softball sized gyroscopic stabilizer, which he picked at with a scribe carefully. At his heels, a crate held six more in various states of disrepair. Spare parts.

                Spare parts everywhere, in shelves lining the two longest walls of the workshop.  Jack was no engineer.  Trial and error had been the name of the game for the last decade. Emphasis on the error part.

                Satisfied that the gyro was clean enough to be functional, he set it aside and then went to check the battery array charging on the generator. Fifty-Five percent. He huffed out a long breath. He’d check it again in the morning.

 

 

                Seventy-eight percent.  He couldn’t get excited. He’d failed before. Repeatedly. There was no reason to expect that he’d gotten it right _this_ time either. He wasn’t sure how many more failures he could take.

                He wouldn’t get excited. Not yet.

                An alert chimed, and Jack finished installing the gyro before he limped his way outside to his garden. It was time to shut off the water cycle in the greenhouse.

                Sunlight glistened in beams through broken clouds; the remains of the previous day’s showers. It was springtime on Harmony, and the flowers were in full, vibrant bloom.  He smiled at the sight of them. They reminded him of BT. 

                BT would love them.  When the Titan had learned about beauty, and developed his own sense of aesthetics, he had been hugely drawn to all plant life, admiring weeds and century old growths with equal impress. Ensconced in a war as they were, he hadn’t had the spare time to pursue botany the way the wanted to.  At the time, Jack hadn’t understood what the big appeal was, but was happy to see BT happy, and that had been all that mattered.

                He liked flowers a lot more now.   They made him feel less lonesome.

 

                There was a settlement not far from his home. He had no need to live like a hermit, but Jack couldn’t bring himself to face humanity. They were a foul, disgusting lot driven by greed and hate, and a self-centeredness that defied all logic.  BT-7274 had been the first to break the ice, but Jack had come to admire the purity of all Synthetics.  AIs saw the world for exactly what it was. Their motives were simple and pure, their logic straight-line. They did not take without giving.

                BT was the first, but far from the last Vanguard Titan AI to develop sentience. Other models, on rare occasion, had as well, but the anomaly ran rampant with the Vanguards. It had been the edge the Militia needed to win the war, but after, when the dust settled, the minds of the people had changed.

                All these brand-new individuals had known nothing but war, and had no concept of how to function in peace.  People were scared.  They remembered the towering war machines, not the often gentle and sympathetic personalities that had come forth.  Jack had never heard of anything bad _actually_ happening, but they had all been eradicated. Just in case.   

                Jack had nearly lost his life, the day they had taken BT away from him, trying to rescue his friend. He had tracked the defense convoy back to the reclamation factory, throwing himself after the Titan as the enormous recycling plant pulled his body apart.  Jack had nearly been torn to shreds himself, but he had made it out with his life, and his friend’s Datacore. The rest of his friend had been melted down without a second thought from the people he had risked everything to save.

                That had been a very long time ago.

                Jack didn’t like to think he hated humanity.  People were gullible, stupid. Violent. He didn’t hate them, but he didn’t forgive them either. They could all stay the hell away from him.

 

                Jack Cooper never forgot.  

 

                The sun had set again by the time the generator finished charging the battery core, and Jack had passed the time tinkering.  He did his best work on the figure on the table, ramshackle as it looked. The joints, the wiring, the hydraulics, all of it was as close to perfect as he could get it.  He had a compelling reason to keep a high work ethic, and since he had already spent a decade at it, a few more hours wouldn’t hurt. Much.

                His heart still leapt up into his throat when the alert went off signifying the battery was finally at full charge.  It had taken all of his self-control to calmly finish what he had been doing, not wanting to be distracted from a partially-finished task, before going over and examining the generator.

                It was a full charge. The first one he had found to retain full capacity without shorting.   Parts were everywhere – literally scattered across the planet – but the power units could be reused without much, if any, work done.  Military grade in particular, like the one in his hands, were tremendously valuable, and essentially unattainable to someone like Jack on the open market.

                Jack, however, had been driven by a force far greater than money, and had gone – literally- the extra mile.  He grimaced a little, thinking about what a shitty day that had become.  If this worked, however, the terror, the bum leg, the years of solitude, everything would be worth it.

                _Knock it off, Coop,_ he thought to himself bitterly. _You can’t lay so much down on such low odds…_

                The battery didn’t install into the chassis as easily as he hoped, but after some finagling, he got it to work.  With great care, he tethered a pair of sensor lines from the repurposed Spectre’s shoulders to a datapad. He watched the program run, diagnostics coming up for every system, frowning slightly. It was slower than he cared for, but workable.  The program completed, and the whole frame shuddered, fingers curling at its sides. Jack let out a bark of laughter, elated.  The Spectre frame sat up, shuddered again, and then simply stopped.  In his hand, Jack’s datapad went dark.  

                “ _Shit!_ ” Jack snarled, and it was all he could do to not throw the datapad. He spun away from the work bench on his heels, throwing his hands up.  He let out a long, muffled growl through gritted teeth, puffing the last of the breath out.  His chest hitched. Carefully, before he lost control, he set the datapad down and hurried out of the workshop.

                He needed a walk.

                He climbed the shallow rise that overlooked his home, and at the top, plunked to the ground with a grunt.  Seated amongst a dark sea of grass and wildflowers, he laid back, eyes searching the night sky. He scrubbed his face with both hands, frustrated.  He wanted to scream, kick and howl at the stars, but he knew it wouldn’t help. It never had, before.

                “I sure miss ya, Buddy.” Jack said to the sky, utterly forlorn. He thought he had done it for sure, this time. It had seemed _so_ close…!

                This was not his first setback, and he had to remind himself he was still making progress.  Just…not as quickly as he wanted. He groaned, glowering up at the sky. He was too old to be having tantrums.   He reached out, rather savagely plucking a daisy that had been growing hear where he lay. He examined it in the darkness, twisting the stem between his thumb and forefingers. He sighed, expelling the frustration and sucking in the clean cool air. He held it, let it out slowly. Rinse. Repeat. 

                Eventually, he sat up, levering himself to his feet. He swayed on his heels a little. He was tired.  Time to go home, shut down the lights in the shop, and go to bed. Things would be better in the morning.

 

                He fiddled with the daisy all the way back down the hill to his home, and was preoccupied with plucking some stray grass fibers out from the petals as he entered the workshop. As such, he didn’t immediately notice what had changed.

                There stood the robotic body he had spent over a decade building, one hand on the workbench for stability, waiting. Not sitting atop the table like he had left it.  At its’ side, the datapad glowed, and while Jack couldn’t make out the readouts from afar, there was a whole lot of green.  Jack dropped the flower, forgetting it immediately, and dashed over to the robot’s side, snatching up the datapad and examining it.

                It was good. All of it.  Jack glanced back up at the vacant, cylindrical head, then over to the gently glowing box in the corner.

                Did he dare?  What if something went wrong? He could fry the entire core, or the chassis, or both.  His friend could be lost forever.  Jack shook himself.  He hadn’t spent a third of his life building BT a new body just to chicken out because there was risk involved.  Stopping now would be the same as having never tried in the first place. 

                He darted across the shop, dancing around the still figure beside him, and stopped at arm’s length from the protective box. 

                He had spent days gazing into that blue glow, when he had first come here, hoping from the depth of his soul that BT could somehow see or hear him, that the Titan could somehow reach out.  It took a long time to realize that, like this, BT would not answer.  He was sleeping, comatose within himself, and Jack had no idea if the AI was aware of what had transpired or not.  He hoped he wasn’t.

                His hands shook as he disconnected the Datacore from the power leads, holding his breath as the blue glow dimmed, but did not darken. Good. He carried it cradled between his ribs back to where the rebuilt TISE body waited, and examined the socket.  Frowning, he licked a thumb, using it to scrub out a little bit of grime from the setting. Satisfied, he brought up the Datacore carefully inserting it into is socket with one hand while he steadied the frame by the shoulder with his other. Part way in, it caught into the connector mechanisms, and retracted the rest of the way on its own.  Jack stepped back, and watched the core rotate and whirr with bated breath.

                He felt like he waited another decade, standing there, his vision starting to spark before he finally remembered to breathe.  He held the datapad loosely in one hand, glancing at it occasionally, vigilant for errors as the core booted up, connecting to the base programming of the body. 

                Jack wasn’t religious.  He had seen literally every single thing he had ever had or loved taken away.  He didn’t believe in the power of a greater being, but as he stood there, waiting, he prayed.  To whom, he didn’t know, or care.  To whomever was willing to listen. Maybe himself.

                “C’mon, BT…” He whispered the name aloud, and all at once, the Datacore went still with a decisive snap, and the head assembly swiveled to stare directly at him. The optic shuttered, blinking slowly at him.  A garbled, static-charged sound rumbled out, and it sounded like a question but the words were unintelligible. The bot blinked twice more, and there was an audible click somewhere in the chassis.

                “Systems….stable.” It blinked. “I think.”

                “BT…?” Jack choked on the name, terrified his friend wasn’t there. 

                “What’s happened, Jack?” BT replied, and Jack watched as the Titan examined him, searching.  “You’ve changed. Somewhat.  My system calendar is nothing but errors… how long has it been?”

                Jack swallowed. Shit. He was going to cry, wasn’t he?

                “Fifteen years, almost,” he answered. BT didn’t look very surprised.

                “And you…?” He glanced all around the workshop, could see the evidence of Jack’s efforts everywhere.  He looked down at his own hands, far rougher than he remembered them. “You’ve spent all this time, haven’t you… rebuilding me.” BT turned his searing gaze back up at Jack, only now noticing the freely flowing tears. “Oh…Jack…” He reached out, towards his friend’s face with both hands.  That face, so familiar yet new.  The eyes were tired, and fine lines gathered at the corners, and around his mouth.  His sideburns and goatee were speckled with gray. Time, BT realized, was relentless on organics.  Jack leant forward, tipping into BT’s reach.

                “I thought I’d lost you forever,” Jack whispered.

                “We have to stop getting separated like this,” BT mused.  He lowered his hands from Jack’s face, only to reach out and pull the man close against him.

                “Do you remember? What happened?” Jack sagged against his torso, and BT was relieved to realize he could feel the pressure, the warmth of the man’s body.  He couldn’t fathom how the Pilot had managed to rebuild his sensornet. 

                “Yes.” It was barely a sound.  He remembered.  He had never once before feared for himself, but on that day, immobilized and laid out on a flatbed, he had heard Jack’s screams fading into the distance and realized that he would _die._ There were no backups, no new chassis.  He had not been done living life yet, not been ready to leave Jack.  He had not been ready. BT had no outlet for the pain like Jack did, and so he just held on to his friend, wondering what it felt like to weep. “Thank you, Jack. For saving me.”

 

                                                Epilogue

 

                Jack stepped out of his home with a frown. Where the hell had BT gone off to? He glanced all around, the gardens, the back. He had just checked the shop.  He picked his way through the garden, peering through some of the taller growths at the back.  Back there?

                A sound like a whistle caught Jack’s attention, and he turned, his gaze following up the rise sheltering their home. At the top, BT waved.

                “Up here!”

                Jack hauled himself up the hill, his limp no longer slowing him down like it used to, and came to a stop at his partner’s side. 

                “Pretty neat view, isn’t it?” Jack said, watching BT’s gaze wander.

                “It’s beautiful…” BT turned, staring at him. All at once, he reached out, pulling Jack clean off his feet and up into his arms. BT fell backwards, Jack letting out a yell, and toppled into the grass with a thud, Jack cradled against his chest safely. Jack laughed, giddy from the rush, and twisted in BT’s arms to sprawl across the larger body, hugging him.  BT fell still, simply holding on happily.  Around them, the grass and the wildflowers danced lightly in the breeze. Jack sighed. The pain, at long last, was gone.

                “Yeah. It is.”

 


End file.
